When a patient is in need of enteral feeding, a feeding catheter is placed into the patient either percutaneously or via a nosogastric tube. The feeding catheter is then connected to a source of nutrition which usually comprises a container holding the liquid nutritional product and tubing (feeding tube set). Different size adaptors are normally provided at the distal end of the feeding tube set for interfitting frictional engagement with the feeding catheter. Further, for many obvious reasons, such frictionally engaged connections may inadvertently become disengaged or separated which, of course, could be detrimental to varying degrees, to the patient's well-being.
After fabrication and until such time that they are connected to a patient's feeding catheter, such adaptors provided on the distal end of a feeding tube set, are often provided with a protective hood or shroud of an appropriate size having a closed forward end and whose only purpose is to protect the adaptor until use of same.
Adaptors currently in the market place, while compatible with most nasogastric, gastrostomic and I.V. feeding tube connectors currently found in the marketplace, are not compatible with the relatively small "needle jejunostomy" catheters. The needle jajunostomy catheter is characterized by relatively small connectors having luer-tapered bores which are not adapted to receive the leading ends of most adaptors. To date, the only solution has been to provide a special custom-designed adaptor, a rather expensive solution to this problem.